Climate change has created new levels of precarity for archival holdings throughout the west coast; it is a cumulative result of past actions often taken in the interest of capital, which had large scale impacts on our environment. These actions have a corresponding historical record which can be found in archives throughout the west. Today, climate change disproportionately affects different communities based on intersections of power and privilege in North America. This session will explore what it means to be responsible for climate-related records, those which document both our present and our past. We will discuss how the documentary history of land and water on the west-coast fits into current collecting around climate-related events. How can institutions archive current, community based records of climate-related events, and create connections with historical records? How can records of the past be used to foster resiliency, instigate new visions of the future and create proactive responses to future climate challenges? Might current records of climate-related events and historical records of natural resource extraction be paired together to document the different experiences of climate-affected publics while helping to create accountable systems of energy and resource management?
